Arashi In Black And White

Arashi in Black and White It started with a challenge: “Calling all Programmers - Arashi in black and white I’ve been playing with trying to get Arashi running on my SE/30. I can get it to build okay, and even not to die with an error when I run in in Black & White mode - but I can’t actually get it to display anything on screen either. I wondered if anyone here might have more luck? B&W Arashi, on the SE/30 and Classic II would be an excellent addition to the Mac Garden - even if a version for the Mac Plus is probably impossible! What do you think? Are you interested in this project? I’ll upload what changes I’ve made to GitHub and you could have a crack at the puzzle too…” Why we did it There were two initial reasons for this project - and two more which became apparent later. The first two are… 1. Arashi is a fantastic game, and very enjoyable on any colour Macintosh - but it doesn’t actually need to be a colour game. Tempest, the game that it is based on, is very enjoyable on a Vectrex - and that can’t display colour at all. Wouldn’t it be great if the compact Macs - and, at the very least, the more powerful compact Macs (Classic II, Performa 200, SE/30) and 1bit PowerBooks (PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170) could play Arashi too? A stretch goal would be for it to be playable on 68000 Macs (Plus, SE, Portable, PowerBook 100) - but that doesn’t appear to be feasible for performance reasons. 2. New games are being released seemingly every day for all kinds of Retro computers. Commodore 64, Spectrum, BBC, IBM PC, Amiga, ST and even for obscurities like the MTX, Oric and Enterprise - but few new games are being released for the 68k classic Macintoshes. It’s time to redress the balance. The reasons that became apparent later are… 1. It proved to be an interesting conversation and way to meet, and learn from, talented software developers who also have an interest in the classic Macintosh. 2. Hopefully it can become a seed for future 68k Macintosh software development - and especially for those original Macs. End result of how After a great deal of hard work and experimentation, several changes were identified as necessary to enable Arashi to run in Black and White. Additionally, several optimisations were identified to improve the speed on lower performance black and white models. ● Mapped colors to black and white. ● “New drawing engine”. ● Optional dotted lines, for slower machines. ● NOTE: Text (which uses lines) is never drawn dotted if that option is selected, since it is unreadable if drawn that way. ● Skipping drawing every other “spot” and “pixel”, for slower machines. ● Inlined C for all drawing when possible (huge boost). ● A few new routines to replace palette animation of original. ● Support 68000 only machines for 1.1.0 (but too slow to be playable un-accelerated!) ● S…